I WILL USE YOUR RIBCAGE AS A XYLOPHONE, a Siren Song
by Jack The Bard
Summary: Krieg's inner voice has been fighting for a very long time to get his thoughts on electronic paper.


"**I WILL USE YOUR RIBCAGE AS A XYLOPHONE", a Siren's Song**

Three Months.

Three months since Krieg had met her, three months since a beautiful woman, a siren, walked into his life and made it possible that he might be able to be a normal human being again. Well… normal in the most vague sense of the word. Maya's appearance had started to stitch together his shattered psyche, and the old Krieg was beginning to come out more and more often.

But Hyperion's torments still haunted him. Even as he and his comrades had watched Lilith take revenge for Roland by killing Handsome Jack, he knew that his mind was more twisted than a pretzel. Even now, as he lay on the roof of Scooter's garage, about to doze off, he knew that he was a long way off from being okay. He had to sleep so far from the rest of the vault hunters since he had a tendency to wake up screaming in the middle of the night about meat and bicycles made of it. That, compounded with Tannis' grinding of her teeth in her sleep had a tendency to keep everyone awake. At least Scooter's snoring drowned out any sounds he could hear Krieg make, and Zed never slept for some reason, so he was just fine.

The next morning, Krieg woke up lucid. The urges to kill were still deep inside, but he held them at bay long enough to take out the ECHO recorder he kept hidden and type two words with a shaking finger on the touchscreen. When the impulses overwhelmed him, he let the recorder drop, and turned his head up to the sky, shouting, "I WILL EAT THE STARS AND POOP OUT THEIR GASES FOR FUEL!" A few people passing by, even though they had seen Krieg do something like this before, shrieked and ran for cover. It was going to be a long day.

Mopping up bandit clans and gnawing on a raw skag steak for lunch and dinner consumed most of Krieg's day, even though that little voice in the back of his mind swelled with elation every time he and Maya watched each other's backs, or even when she smiled at him again. Every time was just as electrifying as the first… Her blue-painted lips curled and parted to say "Thank you", and Krieg wished he could just say, "My pleasure" or even a simple "You're welcome" right back.

"THEIR RIBS SHALL BECOME MY PET BOOMERANG BABIES!"

Close enough. She still knew he held good intentions.

Another month passed and Krieg woke up able to finish the whole last few words of his letter to Maya. It was the most sane he had been since he had escaped from that Hyperion prison, and he felt a sense of elation as he tucked into his Storage Deck. Taking his axe in hand and letting it hang from his belt, he ran to the Crimson Raider Headquarters before the voices could overwhelm his consciousness again.

They hit him three steps before he got there.

The midmorning light made his vision grey as it spun, and he stumbled, dropping to one knee as the urges to kill and pillage and consume and murder rose in his mind. The weaker part of his psyche fought back like it had never fought before, rising up and forcing Krieg one tiny step forward. Then another. Then another. He kept marching forward until he got to the mailbox and pulled it open. A quivering hand reached for the Storage Deck on his belt, the voices swelling and trying to overrun the weaker fragment of sanity as the hand strayed near the axe.

"No…" Krieg muttered under his breath, the first word his sane side had spoken in over a week. "No. Not this time… You're not going to do this to me…" A flick of his fingers brought the ECHO device to his hand, and he lifted it back up, readying to put it into the mailbox, taking care not to drop it or else all would be lost.

All was lost. It slipped from his fingers in a moment of brief distraction. The door to the headquarters swung open, and Krieg snapped up, all of his fragments focused on the person in the doorway.

Maya stood there, yawning and stretching, her eyes snapping wide open in full awareness as she saw the ECHO device tumble from Krieg's fingers, and thrust a hand out. Her siren energies coursed down her tattooed arm, resulting in the ECHO being trapped in a globe of pulsing, purple energy. The sanity that was left in him let out a sigh of relief, but panicked as he realized that she saw him delivering it. The darkness washed over his mind in a wave of blood, causing him to drop down to his rump in disbelief before he grabbed the buzz axe at his side and smashed the blunt end into his forehead, screaming, "QUIET!"

Needless to say, Maya was quite perturbed by this, and while Krieg went to war with himself, she brought the orb to her hand, plucking the ECHO device out of it. All that was on it was a single text file labeled "For Maya". Her brow wrinkled in confusion, and she opened it, beginning to read.

"_Maya,_

_I know that this comes as a surprise to you, that I'm able to write, read, or even have a lucid thought instead of screaming something about blood or gore or meat, but I need to tell you something really important. This letter is being written by a very small part of me that wants to be a normal person once again. Not the side that screamed "Poop Train" at you when we first met, but rather the little voice inside that convinced the rest of me to save you from the rats._

_You have made me feel human again._

_Your simple kindnesses, the gentle smiles and words of thanks, actually watching my back instead of shooting it when I charge into battle in a blood rage, they have all contributed to me hopefully being able to become normal, more or less. I cannot count the times I have wanted to tell you this, or how many days I spent just trying to build up enough willpower to write down two or three words at a time. I fell in love with you the first time I saw you, Maya. And I will pull myself together to fight any number of rats, or bandits, or Hyperion robots just to see your smile every day of my life. You have started to heal me, and I hope that I can have a normal conversation with you someday._

_Thank you,_

_Krieg"_

Maya's face formed an expression of shock the more and more she read, a blush beginning to dust her cheeks as she hit the final paragraph. Once finished, she looked up and saw Krieg still smacking himself in the head, grumbling at himself angrily as he tried to silence the little voices, and she asked quietly, "Krieg?"

His gaze snapped up and his eyes narrowed at her before widening in a moment of clarity. He pointed at himself as his brow wrinkled in confusion under his gas mask. Maya knelt down in front of him, taking his face in her hands gently, saying, "I want to talk with you someday too, Krieg. Even if it's not today, or tomorrow, or next week or next month, I want to hear what you are really like. Thank you for being so kind."

Krieg nodded slowly, the lucid part of his mind in full control for the moment as he felt her fingers brush his skin for a moment. Strange how something so rough and callused could still be so delicate…

Maya leaned in, her blue lips pressing a soft kiss to the part of Krieg's mask that hid his mouth before rising, and the little voice inside felt at peace. For now. She made her way back to the door of HQ, looking over her shoulder to say, "I'll see you later, okay?"

Krieg nodded, and for once, his response was spot on.


End file.
